Bloomberg, Holding Nose, Opened Wallet

To listen to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last week was to call to mind a dyspeptic duke.

He took to the radio on Friday and unburdened himself about the sludge tide of corruption that has overrun this city. Our political class — from which he pointedly excluded himself — has failed us. They don’t understand policy. They promote each other’s corruptions. And there is no real difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

New Yorkers must wake up. “You have to have a revolution among the voters,” he said.

Let’s posit that New York’s politics offers a spectacular multivehicle wreck. To read the criminal complaints released last week by federal prosecutors is to feel a perverse pride. These politicians appear to have mastered the mechanics of corruption.

So Assemblyman Eric A. Stevenson, a Democrat of the Bronx, is accused of delivering a minicourse on proper

bribegiving. (You hand me the envelope with $10,000 cash outside a steakhouse, away from the surveillance cameras.) And Councilman Daniel J. Halloran III, a Queens Republican, is accused of saying that a bribe-maker who wants a no-show job and contract must absolutely not forget to provide a tax identification number and name for his corporation. Must they explain everything?

Our mayor draws no distinction between good and bad representatives: “You cannot expect elected officials to go and do something that will keep them from feeding their families.”

Here, I suppose Mr. Bloomberg talks from empirical observation in his 12 years in office. In that time, few have done more to feed slop to the worst actors in this system than our mogul mayor. In 2009, when he decided that his professed love of term limits was silliness and that he would like the Republican Party nomination, he spread cash the way a farmer spreads manure in spring.

In all, he and his operatives handed out more than $800,000 to various Republican organizations. Afterward, the mayor toured the city’s various Republican committees, like a don making postprandial rounds. As The New York Observer described one such visit, he took a kiss on both cheeks, offered a smile here or there, listened to a few money-besotted giggles, and then slipped back into his black S.U.V.

And what did the mayor’s gold buy besides political allegiance? In the Bronx, campaign-finance records reveal that the party boss, Joseph Savino, dined exceptionally well, at the Full Moon Trattoria ($266) in Purchase, N.Y., and the Pomona Chop House ($199) in Pomona, N.Y.

Nor can the mayor object if his money was spent frivolously. Before Mr. Savino took over the Bronx Republican Party, he worked as a top aide for State Senator Guy J. Velella, whose long tenure in politics ended with a few months in jail on a bribery conviction. And now, alas, Mr. Savino has been indicted on charges of bribetaking.

Not to pile on the mayor, but there really is more. So we have the strange tale of the Independence Party, a bizarre amalgam of right-wing populists married to black leftists and once led by Fred Newman, a Marxist therapist who, The Daily News reported, advocated “friendosexuality” — translated as having sex with patients.

Whatever. Mr. Newman controlled a party line and Mr. Bloomberg all but purchased it. He gave the party more than $400,000 over the years and promised to support nonpartisan elections.

Ask about his giving, and the mayor can seem to marvel at your naïveté. Few of his class, he cautions, share his tolerance for the noisome hoi polloi. “Friends of mine will not go into public service,” he said. “And I don’t blame them.”

No doubt electoral politics can be an annoyance. But if the mayor is in the mood for honesty, he might acknowledge that his class has made a substantial contribution to our corrupt age. Mr. Savino stands accused of taking a $15,000 bribe in exchange for promising to help place State Senator Malcolm A. Smith on the mayoral ballot as a Republican. And two assemblymen in the Bronx may have brought dishonor on themselves.

At the same time, in the last three months, the United States attorney in Manhattan has announced the arrest of two hedge-fund financiers, and the sentencing of six more. Each of these finely educated and newly minted felons engaged in corruption worth millions of dollars.

“The system is broken,” the mayor notes. Really, who could disagree with him?

E-mail: powellm@nytimes.com

Twitter: @powellnyt

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Bloomberg, Holding Nose, Opened Wallet. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe